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Apportionment Matters: Fair Representation in the US House and Electoral College

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2009

Brian J. Gaines  and
Jeffery A. Jenkins
Brian J. Gaines
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and the Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois. E-mail: [email protected]
Jeffery A. Jenkins
Affiliation:
Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics and Faculty Associate in the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The 2000 presidential election made various electoral institutions—from ballot format to voting mechanisms—suddenly prominent in public debate. One institution that garnered little attention, but nonetheless affected the outcome, was apportionment. A few commentators, looking ahead to 2004, noticed that Bush would have won more comfortably had the apportionment based on the 2000 census already been in place for the 2000 election. Little attention, however, was paid to the method by which 1990 census data were used to generate the 1992–2000 apportionment, even though there are many ways to perform that allocation, the United States has used different methods over its history, and the precise algorithm turned out, in this instance, to matter. More generally, previous discussions of apportionment methods have neglected the point that allocation to states of US House seats simultaneously determines Electoral College weights. Since the Electoral College has built-in biases favoring small states, an apportionment method that partially offsets this bias might be justifiable. We revisit some criteria by which one might prefer one apportionment rule to another, in light of this double duty.

Type
Research Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 7 , Issue 4 , December 2009 , pp. 849 - 857
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2009

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